Is This... Real?

Five years ago, when shown a doctored picture, the average computer user was able to clearly tell it was edited. Two years ago, deep-fakes became a thing, but one could still feel something is not right. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult for even the seasoned internet dweller to tell original and synthetic pictures apart. The rate at which synthesized digital media approaches reality is accelerating. Text, images, and audio all have specialized mechanisms by which they can be generated to mimic real media and real art. It should come as no surprise if one day, in the next ten years, we watch the world’s first (decent) AI-generated movie.

Humans can no longer tell real and synthetic apart. To put that statement to the test, I participated in an online competition for the best photo depicting “doing sports while saving energy”. Being a cat person myself, I really wanted to see a cat riding a bicycle, and it seemed like a good fit for this contest. So, given DALL-E 2’s recent announcement that the rights to all images generated by its platform are now owned by the users who generate them, I headed over and typed in the prompt:

cat riding a bicycle at sunset, back view

I fiddled around with the prompt a bit and generated a few more photos until I got my winner:

Almost everything about this was… just right. The lighting, the reflections, the depth of field, even the cat’s fur coat. It all looked real. The bicycle handle bugged me a bit, so I decided to crop it out and submit the photo to the contest. It made it past moderation and was accepted (although frankly, so did a doctored photo of an elephant in the sea). After all, I was not breaking any rules; I owned the rights to the image, and no where did they specify it needed to be “real”—it is very hard to define what is real for digital media anyway; cameras apply color transformations and filters to images all the time, how are those more real than a full-fledged neural network?

I would still like to win the contest (been wanting an e-bike ever since I came to Switzerland). If you’re feeling generous, you can help me out by pressing on the heart:

You may also check out the contest or participate in it over here.

Thank you!